72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games, according to study
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/72-of-devs-believe-steam-has-a-monopoly-on-pc-games-according-to-studyOpen linkView original on lemmy.ml218
Comments225https://www.gamesindustry.biz/72-of-devs-believe-steam-has-a-monopoly-on-pc-games-according-to-studyOpen linkView original on lemmy.ml
I think there is a distinction to be made between being a monopoly and doing anti-competitive behavior.
Steam hasn't done any anti-competitive behavior that I am aware of, but they do have enough market power to be considered a monopoly. Consider how companies like EA and Activision tried to maintain competing platforms but caved because those platforms were not viable compared to Steam. That's monopoly power.
theres basically one anti conpetitive measure they hold primarily, and its the one that states the listing price of a game must be the same on all platforms policy. stops devs from having a lower listing price on other platforms.
other than that its usually other platforms shooting their selves.
I'm pretty sure that that only applies to steam keys being sold on other sites. If it's being distributed in some other form, it can be cheaper.
This “most favored nation” clause in contracts is huge! It means that even if another store takes half of Steam’s cut (say, 15% vs 30%), the game can’t be sold for less, meaning other rival stores can never compete on price. In other words, Steam drives up prices for games economy-wide. Amazon does something similar, and this was part of the basis the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against them.
You must be joking
Say I sold a game for $10 on Steam and GameStoria. With the 30% you suggest I would take home $7 from Steam and $8.50 from GameStoria. I make more with a competitor who is willing to take less and of their instead wanted to charge more, Steam would be more profitable.. The consumer doesn't see anything but a $10 game.
Steam doesn't prevent anyone from selling their game at whatever price they want. They only prevent them from selling it through THEIR distribution platform at a lower price than it can be purchased directly from Steam. IE they cannot sell steam keys for less than the steam list price. If they want to distribute themselves they can.
Failing to make a product that doesn't suck shit does not make a monopoly for your competitor.
In fact, Steam is de facto not a monopoly because of the very existence of GOG. EA and Activision tried to break in to this arena but failed to provide a product that actually switched people off of steam, because they failed to provide a comparable experience to steam. GOG did, and they're doing fine.
By this logic Google isn’t a search monopoly because DuckDuckGo exists, despite Google buying default placement in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, etc to make sure no other search provider can compete, with their bribe to Apple alone totaling $20 billion a year to maintain their search dominance. What do you think monopoly power is if not that?
Can you describe where Steam has done anything even approaching that, ever?
EA and Activision stores didn't fail because Steam bought them out and bullied them out of the market, they failed because they were trash products. Steam doesn't buy "default placement" in anything. They just have a good product that people want to use over alternatives.
Point out a situation in which Steam has acted anti-competitive and I might agree that you have a point, but I can't think of any situations to call out here.
Whether something is a monopoly or not is independent of anti-competitive practices. It's about market power.
If there's a genuinely good product that's popular because it's good. There's no need to step in and give shittier products more share in the market.
The point in breaking up monopolies is to be more fair for consumers. If you want to say they're technically a monopoly because they have a large share of the market then fine. But I don't see that as a bad thing until it starts abusing its power.
I agree that Steam is pretty good as it is, and there are certainly more pressing concerns. However, in an ideal world, what Steam does should probably be handled by the public sector because it's a natural monopoly. People like only having to go to one place to find their games, but that place doesn't have to be controlled by a for-profit corporation.
yes, it is "is independent of anti-competitive practices", a monopoly is when there is only one company providing a product or service
Um, there is more than one type of anticompetitive practice? Amazon uses predatory pricing to drive companies out of business, Microsoft uses tying to sell Teams, Google uses self-preferencing for their own services in search results, Facebook acquired Instagram rather than compete with them, etc.
One of Valve’s favorite anticompetitive cudgels is requiring “most favored nation” clauses in their contracts, prohibiting devs from selling for less on other storefronts (which Amazon also has used).
None of which are related to Steam nor has Steam done anything resembling any of these examples to my knowledge.
Valve prohibits people from selling steam keys for less on other storefronts which I think is perfectly reasonable. You can list your game on Steam for $20 and distribute it on Itch for $5 or even free and Steam has zero problem with this, so long as you aren't distributing steam keys via that storefront. This is to try and prevent a developer from leveraging Steam for advertisement purposes but making all their actual sales off-platform.
GoG has, like, 1/5th the market share of Steam. It's not nearly big enough to prevent Steam from having monopoly power. If Steam came out with a policy saying that games could not be on both Steam and GoG, the vast majority of devs would release on Steam. That's monopoly power which Steam has, regardless of whether they are currently abusing it or not.
If they do anti-competitive behaviour then that would make them a monopoly.
"Steam is so popular because they're good not because they're a monopoly"
"Oh yeah? Well what if Steam was a monopoly? They would be a monopoly then right!"
Even if there were literally no other competitors, GOG holding 1/6th of the market share (your words) absolutely precludes Steam from being a monopoly.
You're using a different definition of monopoly from what I'm using. To quote Wikipedia:
I'm using the latter of those definitions. I don't think it's particularly useful to only consider it a monopoly when there are literally no competitors. I think it is useful to consider it a monopoly when it has dominant market power. Steam's estimated 75-80% market share is dominant market power.
So how often does steam charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises?
One doesn't have to actually use a power in order to have that power. If I was carrying a loaded shotgun, I would have firepower. I wouldn't have to actually fire the gun to have firepower.
Also, one could argue (and Epic Games has) that Steam's 30% cut is overly high for digital distribution. I'm not sure whether that's true or not, but that doesn't really matter to the question of whether Steam has dominant market power.
Bullshit. Being the most popular platform does not automatically make a monopoly, this is armchair lawyer nonsense.
It's true that I am not a lawyer, so feel free to not take what I say as what the law says. I think that the law certainly should consider Steam to be a monopoly with its level of market power, even if it doesn't currently.
From what I have heard from actual lawyers, monopolies are not currently illegal under US law anyways. They're only illegal when combined with anticompetitive practices. That's my best understanding as a non-lawyer, anyways.
I think they were viable but nobody trusts EA and Activision with keeping the game they buy.
Yes, this, so many people use words but don't know what they mean.
Yes, Steam is an effective monopoly.
You don't need to literally be the only possible option, the entire market, to be 'a monopoly'.
Economists very often refer to a company that has just a vastly oversized market share and other kinds of market influence, ws compared to the next comptetitor or set of competitors, as a monopoly.
Like uh, Walmart has a decent chance of having a local, effective monopoly on the grocery market, if you live in a whole lot of US cities.
And also yes, when it comes to anti trust law... yeah you generally have to do things that are either current anti competetive or anti consumer practices, of have done them in the past to acquire your monopoly status, to be broken up by a possible Sherman Act based action.
It is actually possible to become a monopolist without doing anything particularly uncommon in the market, or underhanded... its possible that just no one bothers to meaningfully compete with you untill its too late.
Seriously. Part of the reason they're even so popular is because they aren't actively pursuing profit maxxing/enshittification business practices to corner the market and consolidate market share like every other one of these blood sucking cretins. They really are one of the extremely short list of corporations that ACTUALLY win in the marketplace because their product really is just that good. Running the steam deck with Linux, contributing to the development of Wine/Proton, and telling Microsoft to kick rocks has made me a Gaben fanboy for life. If Steam was the ONLY way you could purchase PC games, I'd honestly be fine with that, as long as Valve remains a private company under the iron fist of Mister Newell.
Remaining a privately held company is really the only protection from enshittification. Not a guarantee, mind you.
Gabe Newell is a man with a red button on his desk that, if pressed, will immediately grant him 11 figures to distribute as he pleases. It's labeled "sell Valve to Microsoft/go public". Newell hasn't pressed the button. Newell and his employees are satisfied with "making shitloads of money" and don't need to "make more shitloads than last year, forever".
I can reasonably say that Newell probably won't press that button during his lifetime. Similarly, I'd trust anyone with that button to hold onto it no matter what, because "if it's getting pressed, it should be me pressing it."
Once Newell dies, many bets are off. That's a really, really tempting button to press. There are very few humans likely to not press it.
Well they are certainly the exception, not the rule. I'll take it, but we definitely got cosmically lucky to have steam exist in this timeline the way it does. 99/100 times it's a soulless shit factory that's entirely reflective of the AAA industry as a whole.
Yep, exactly.
They don't have a board of investors demanding LINE GO UP FASTER, the way that say, MSFT did, demanding their games division hit a 30% profit margin for the last 5 years, and then I guess being surprised that that level of short term thinking blew it all up.
But, on the flip side... who the fuck knows what's gonna happen when Gabe either passes the torch or quits.
Hooray capitalism, lol.
Words don't matter. Do well and have a platform that most prefer? You're a monopoly. People don't realize that to be a monopoly you must be the only source and actively prevent access to or other sources of the same product. How many of those using the term monopoly regarding Steam have GOG Galaxy, Epic, Battle.net, and etc. installed on their machines, ya think.
Being the best does not a monopoly make!
Edit: Further, and speaking of Epic, I never heard of Steam paying devs to pull their games from other platforms for exclusivity deals.
Steam does force the sellers on their platform to not give better discounts elsewhere. So basically if you see a game that’s 20% off on steam and it is ATL, you won’t find it 30% off anywhere else.
Not necessarily a monopoly but definitely not allowing competitive pricing.
Now that I think about it, it’s probably why Epic has to go with the “timed exclusive” approach instead of just giving you a bigger discount.
Not actually true. They only require price parity for steam keys. Basically don't sell steam copies anywhere cheaper than on steam. Any other copy you can sell for whatever price.
I linked their own guidelines regarding steam key prices. They do require price parity with steam for steam keys. (with some exceptions)
But the key price is the same, they giving you a discount. They can't change the price of 100$ to 80$ without giving a 20% discount.
It does matters because is how price parity works, promotions has a beginning and end date, it's not based on the lowest price at a time but in the consistency of the price.
I believe the clause applies to any storefronts as it operates on the MFN pricing principle.
But let’s say it doesn’t, and you’re correct and you could buy the same game on itch, gog, humble, epic, M$ store, ubi store, whatever else.
Did you ever actually see any of the stores promote better pricing on their first party platform? I haven’t.
Did you ever see assassins creed games being 5$ cheaper if you buy them on the ubi store as an example?
Same as the above for humble, epic, EA, Microsoft?
That’d be a pretty effective way to drive people to your storefront and drive first party sales with additional profit to the first party… and yet for some reason that practice apparently doesn’t exist.
I am almost 100% sure that’s not done out of the goodness of the shareholders hearts and has more to do with the legal spaghet of it all.
But at the end of the day the above is speculation, I have no concrete way to prove it one way or the other besides the limited observations that I’ve made over the years.
Good resource, thanks
They don't want to drive you to your storefront so that you get the games cheaper. They want to sell for the same price without paying commission. They want to pocket the difference, not give it to you.
I've never seen a reliable source display steam has price parity. Their steam key price parity however is very clearly displayed. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
What do you mean it doesn't exist? Epic got me to download their launcher because they were selling gta 5 for free. How could I have found that out if I only play on steam???
Not true. I just checked the first game currently discounted I know on GOG's front page: Ghost Runner. It's at -75% (7.49€) on GOG but full price (29.99€) on Steam.
Price parity doesn't mean no discounts. All games in all platforms are the same fucking base price, each store front applies different discounts for different products based on their metrics. The other guy is right, EGS doesn't get 30% cut like steam but their games is not 15%-20% cheaper, if they give you a 15% once in the blue moon doesn't mean shit.
Compare to lowest all time price on steam, not current price. Pretty sure it’s going to come out to the same.
Goal post.
They have a functional monopoly on game launchers, but it isn’t illegal to have a monopoly — it’s only illegal to use that monopoly for anti-competitive actions.
A monopoly in law doesn’t mean total (100%) market control; it means having the power to control prices or exclude competition. Courts often refer to this as monopoly power.
A monopoly could exist with as little as 50% of the market, or even lower. Steam has around 70–80%, which is easily enough to be considered a monopoly. However, you could argue that despite their large market share, they can’t truly control the market, since it’s their goodwill and consumer-friendly behavior that earned them that share in the first place — and if they ever tried to abuse it, people might go elsewhere.
Personally, I don’t really believe that. Considering your entire library is tied to their platform, they could pull all kinds of shady tactics if they wanted to. But it’s an argument.
As far as I’m concerned, Steam is the least evil of the major corporations. I can overlook the secret gambling ring and possible dark-money smuggling complicity because they seem to be a net benefit to consumers, and the harm mostly falls on those complicit in the scheme — as well as on China and Russia.
Edit, fixed spelling.
Il Epic had free cloud saves and more social aspects they would be a much more appealing option, especially because they are much friendlier towards indie devs since they demand a much lower service fee. Steam is just the best for consumers right now
Also if they didn’t have an irrational hatred for Linux.
heroic launcher to the rescue!
I don't know if I would say they're a monopoly there are other options/store fronts out there...it's just that the vast majority outside of GOG suck. in fact they all suck OTHER than Steam and GOG.
And as a Linux user...I ain't got much of a choice. Steam, now, just works for me. I don't even have to toggle the compatibility option anymore or hell even mess around with proton if I don't want to. install steam via whatever package manager or flatpak and i'm off to the races.
Anything other than Steam is unlikely to work. EA, Epic, and Microsoft have all essentially told me they don't want my business simply because I use Linux.
I think it qualifies as a monopoly because of the network effect of having so many users and so many games on it. Especially on the developer side, it's basically mandatory to release your game on Steam because the number of users you can reach is so much higher than any other platform.
That being said, it's not a monopoly that most people have a problem with because they generally continue to serve users well even though they have enough market power that they could enshittify things. If they were a public company they almost certainly would have done that by now.
It's not a monopoly. I've tried the other store fronts and they either don't work on linux or they are extremely anti-competitive. I'm not sure why you're dying on this hill but good luck.
So, it's not a monopoly... because there are no viable alternatives?
You can sell your game for different prices on different platforms, you just can't sell steam keys that way. If you purchase a game on Itch and it gives you a steam key, that's still a steam purchase and is subject to this restriction. If you purchase a game on Itch and it hands you an installer then you can buy that game at whatever price they want to sell it at.
That’s just not true in practical terms. If you want your game to be discovered and you don’t have a massive advertising budget, it’s not a serious option to try to forego selling on Steam while staying in business as a game developer. That’s like saying Amazon isn’t an ecommerce monopoly because you’re not “forced” to sell there, even though that would mean bankruptcy and irrelevance for most sellers.
If Steam suddenly introduced a policy that prohibited devs from selling on other platforms alongside Steam, most devs would choose Steam because they would make way more money on Steam than elsewhere.
The power to do that is monopoly power, regardless of whether Steam is abusing that power currently. I think that their behavior on the whole is pretty good, but that doesn't make them not a monopoly.
This!
fyi heroic launcher installs and runs epic and gog games beautifully
epicea and uplay is a bit more complicated, but with a bit of fiddling, lutris worked well enough for meunfortunately (?) no solution for microsoft/xbox stuff yet, if they're not on steam i mean
that said i'm not giving any money these companies (except for gog ofc), but free stuff is free
As a Linux user, exactly as well.
As long as Steam keeps giving me a great platform that doesn't suck, as long as they continue to push Linux gaming forward, I'll keep sending them money.
It's weird because normally having a monopoly is really bad but all the competition pales in comparison to Steam and they actually provide a good platform. Maybe after Gaben dies Steam will go to shit but for now they're not just the best but also doing way more than just being a place to buy games.
I'm expecting that to be the case, so I hedge my bets by also buying from GOG and praying for Gabe to have a long life.
Thats the thing about gaming specifically. Like there will always be piracy for steam to compete with, and opensource technology like proton, wine. I thank steam for contributing to linux gaming, steamdeck etc, but will drop them in an instant if they go bad.
Valve: Has reasonably priced games on sale frequently
Makes the Steam Deck
Actively supports Linux, both for VR and regular gaming
Has the best customer service out of any competitor
Has the best store experience out of any competitor
I mean.....it's not surprising that they're a monopoly, but that doesn't make them a bad one.
I fear for the day GabeN has to pass on the torch 😖
Which one of his 3 mega yachts do you think he'll pop his clogs on?
Right lol, people just don't know what a true monopoly is, steam isnt doing anything that prevents other businesses from being able to run, function, or succeed. They just provide such a good service that everyone has been drawn to them. They literally won a monopoly lawsuit against them because, as previously mentioned, they perform no anti-competition practices to our knowledge or the knowledge of our courts. It's why gog is still able to rise in popularity and support, because all you have to do is provide a good service and crazy maybe people won't be opposed to using it. Would these said artists prefer using epic games store? Or god forbid whatever the hell EA has been cooking up recently. Or is it just click bait and the artists don't actually give a fuck about putting their content on steam, but still think they're a monopoly. I don't care enough to read the article so meh.
Valve essentially just focuses on a good platform and let's every other storefront shoot themselves in the foot.
Who makes the games? 🤔
Valve has made games. Damn good ones at that.
You know HALF-LIFE Counter Strike Portal Team Fortress 2
and are the makers of the source engine powering Titanfall 1, 2, Apex and a lot more
Oh yeah when did those come out and how much of Valve's revenue do they account for lol?
If you count only Valve's own games' sales, those earned nowhere as much as the steam market trade of TF2 hats and CS skins
Exactly, Valve's success has been defined by the extent to which they have financialized their few games, stretched their IP, and used that as a games publisher. It's because they're a rentier with no games of their own any more that they are a virtual economy monopoly...
Benevolent Dictatorship?
More of an elected monarchy really..
All hail king Gabe!
Not really. You can choose to go somewhere else at any time. Even the Steam Deck is open to installing a different OS that doesn't even include the Steam store.
I like that their services are so good they don't even need to make any restrictions to get you into using them. If I installed another OS on my steam deck, I would still install the Steam store...
Why isn't their cut mentioned? This seems like the most important information.
The owner of the marketplace has the right to charge merchants who sell their goods in a safe place provided by the owner, especially when the market itself is delivering and garunteeing the product works.
So yeah, Valve takes more than other companies, but unlike say Epic Games valve is actually making sure the devs deliver a working product.
... Am I still on lemmy?
The whole thread is a corporate talk and
AppleSteam fan mix. Your first paragraph...We're discussing a monopoly, and all I am reading is how good a product they're making.
Shouldn't the discussion also be about their costs, margins?
Is the market difficult to enter by its nature? How much would the users and developers benefit from more competition?
And I still dont know their cut.
Be pedantic as you want, steam makes no bones about it being 30%.
And unlike other marketplaces, Steam doesn't demand exclusivity. If anything they encourage publishers and developers to put their content on other storefronts or other alternatives that are available. Unlike, say Origin, Epic Games or what ever the hell Ubisoft was trying to.
Steam taking 30% may seem steep but they do a lot of support for developers in addition to the largest PC marketplace out there, complete with built in communities around new games where developers can directly interact with players of their game(s.) As long as the game works as advertised, Steam has historically done very little to penalize or inhibit developers on the market place. And nearly every case of it that has come to light has been admitted to be a mistake and rectify, such in the case of Hatred, or has been transparent about a third party stopping short of legal action, such as in the case of the Mastercard censorship scandal.
Compare that to Epic Games, who provides basically no support to developers, no community features or anyway to connect with other people who enjoy that specific game or those like it, and actively spies on users and is somewhat infamous for downloads servers to sporadically go down or corrupt a game require multiple attempts to ensure the product works. All while taking 12%
Steam isn't perfect, they've screwed stuff up and missed a few bad actors in their midst before, but overall they are very pro-consumer and provide an open and fair platform where indie games can get showcased on the front page of the store as much if not more so than AAA games with million dollar advertising campaigns. Many of those indie games never would have seen the light of day without steam.
Steam is basically today what Netflix was in the late 00s/early 10s. A massive collection of content for people to enjoy that actively opposed the idea of exclusivity or preventing other. Where Epic is actively trying to push gaming to where Streaming is today by trying to bribe publishers and developers with better deals and kick backs if they agree to put their game on EGS exclusively for 6 to 18 months if not permanently.
Steam isn't blocking anyone from competing as far as I'm aware. It's just that most customers don't to switch to a new platform because none of the competition is better than they are and we don't want to have to juggle multiple launchers. If Steam started being assholes to the customers or developers stopped putting games on there we'd look at other options.
Supposing Steam is a monopoly what remedy do propose that wouldn't make the user experience worse for their customers?
They have the largest share and can direct the market/development, no question, but they not a monopoly. I think GOG has a good shot to complete as time carries on. At least while Gabe is still alive, they've been relatively ethical.
If the choice of largest developer platform is between Steam and companies like Epic, EA, or Microsoft, Steam still looks like a better alternative.
I buy games on GOG when they're available, but it seems like their market share is getting smaller as time goes on.
That said, the barrier to entry for a Steam competitor is non-existent, so they may never really be able to have a true monopoly. They can still have problematic levels of influence, though. I'm sincerely worried about what direction Valve will take after Gaben retires or dies.
Yeah other than gog and itch every other platform is terrible. Epic gives a bigger share to devs and gives away a lot of free games, but they're a publicly traded company trying to buy their way into the market so they can enshittify.
Basically, there isn't a moat around pc game stores, but competitors aren't even trying to be as nice as steam, and many publishers don't publish to the best alternative because they want to use DRM (gog)
220+ free games in the library. One paid game that was an exclusive that wasn't worth it in the end. No other transactions. Haven't done the math, but in retail prices, that's a lot of money to piss away hoping I'll spend anything more.
They're not giving away retail price games. They're paying dev teams single payouts to make a game limited-time-claimable. Your copy of a $60 game didn't cost Epic $60, it cost them "$400k divided by number of downloads within the promo period". And the devs take the payout because they know it's coming in addition to all the paying customers on Steam. Basically a guaranteed return on investment.
Whoa, that's really neat information. Thanks for sharing!
MS Gamepass uses the same model. Some percentage of a customer's $30/mo doesn't go to Sandfall Studios for "selling" Expedition 33 on Gamepass, Sandfall got a fat lump sum from MS in exchange for MS being allowed to distribute their game to subscribers.
Another banger. What other secrets do you have to share?
Sure is! Didn't say their strategy was working lol
Steam has so many features built-in like steam input, remote play [together], the forums with guides and stuff while most other platfors are relatively barebones, I'm not sure all stores have regional pricing either, they say Steam is a monopoly but they have done a lot to gain their market share for better or for worse
Steam remains on top because they remain the best. Can't say I'd happily switch to a different platform given the games in my library but I'm open to it if the store provides a better experience
Came here to rant similarly. Just because they're the biggest in the market does not mean they have a monopoly. There are plenty of options available, no one is locked into using or selling on steam.
"Lock-in" doesn't make it a monopoly; market share does, and Steam dominates there. So much so that EA gave up on offering things exclusively on Origin.
That means they're a monopoly. Having some small fry competitors doesn't make you not a monopoly.
Look up the case of Standard Oil, against which an antitrust suit was filed, charging it with abusive monopolistic practices. The case was won, and Standard Oil was broken up - at a time when it had less than 70% market share.
Remind people that a monopoly isn't illegal. Abusing a monopoly to prevent competition and using a monopoly as a means to create unfair market conditions in other categories - Windows and web browsers in the past or Apple's monopoly on iOS software distribution.
Consoles are even more restrictive than an iPhone is still in the US and was in the EU. Complain about Steam all these devs and people want, unless it can be proven that Valve is using their market share to stop other companies from competing well, it's a moot point calling them a monopoly. That Wolfire lawsuit when I read the initial court filings they put out was a joke. It was citing Twitter posts and blogspam articles citing anonymous forum posts
Steam was not the first PC digital distribution store. It wasn't even great until like 2006/2007. In the early days Impulse could have been competitive but Stardock sold it to GameStop who in dumb move of the last 2 decades did nothing with it. Desura did not improve. GFWL was terrible. Windows Store used to have issues with making storage unreclaimable without a reformat of the drive. Direct2Drive never improved. GamersGate just stayed a key seller. GoG was never going to grow without regular day one games which wasn't going to be competitive as DRM free. Humble Store stayed a key seller.
Amazon and Epic's idea was to just give away games. Ubisoft and EA stores barely even had games they didn't publish. So sparse I bet they didn't have self publishing tools. Those 2 puzzlingly regularly had issues maintaining login sessions persisting over time. PC gaming is dieing was the mainstream meme until like 2015. Epic on Android doesn't even have a library of owned games view and it's been almost a year since that released.
Valve didn't make Amazon, Microsoft, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Stardock+GameStop, Direct2Drive, ... all under invest and/or mismanage their PC game store platform efforts. It's not up to Valve to stop making the platform more appealing. EGS is 7 years old. Those other companies have been doing PC game stores for much longer. I remember buying and downloading PC games from Amazon before Prime gaming. It was just like Direct2Drive. Since 2004 Direct2Drive was always a storefront for any publishers game whereas Steam didn't start listing 3rd party games until 2005.
If any service was comparable to like end of 2013 Steam, that would easily be second best store platform. Instead every store is at best like 2010 Steam with nicer animations, bigger buttons. And today there's way more resources to make a competitor. More cloud service providers with mature onboarding tools. NPM install. A lot more open source databases. Kubernetes. Git. Etc. Should be able to do better than 7 year old Steam in 7 years from these companies that were far larger than 2002/2003 Valve when they got into PC game distribution. The big publishers were probably all wealthier than Valve up to like 2015
It's not Sony and Nintendo's fault that since the Kinect on the 360, Microsoft hasn't been able to manage their studios to be competitive with Nintendo and Sony studios
Absofuckinglutely. Being a monopoly happens when your product is just that good. What you do when you are a monopoly, that's a different matter. And Valve is doing OK so far, yeah, not perfect, but that's how these things go.
Does this mean Steam is guaranteed to always be equally good? No.
Does this mean Steam is an evil monopoly right now? No. At the moment they are just a monopoly as people prefer them over the competition.
100% agree to everything. Steam is monopoly. But they implement policies for gamers in mind, not money. If anything, devs should praise Steam for decreasing gaming piracy. Things that Valve do for gamers is incomparable to whatever EA, Ubi, Epic do.
So, no. It's enshittification.
They literally have no choice, this was under threat of being essentially cut off any banking system. It's fucked up, no questions about it, but it's a societal problem that needs to be addressed legally, as any single company is powerless against that. Even Apple would not survive being banned by visa & MC
This goes one way or another, some countries benefit from the unchanging conversions
I don't know how expensive it is to run Steam, and they certainly could afford to lower their cut with how much infinite money they have, but with how much Steam offers to developers and the potential cost of bandwidth, it doesn't really seem that bad?
The alternative is to be cut-off from those payment processors and only take money through some other means
That's the problem of the monopoly (or large dominant market share) - Steam doesn't have to compete for us with anyone.
Then why aren't 72% of games on GOG.
Yeah I gotta say that I am a steam fanboy, but GOG is making me pause. After 20 years of being on steam (oh my god it's been that long) I am finding myself preferring GOG. No DRM is pretty sick.
They want to fight back against steam the winner isn't more DRM, it's using valve's own weapon against them, and using less DRM.
If it wasn't for Valve's aggressive support for Linux (and GOG being for-profit and hence inherently evil) then I'd definitely prioritize GOG.
Steam's for-profit too. The term you're looking for that describes CDPR but not Valve is "publicly traded" or simply "has shareholders".
"For-profit" refers to a legally binding obligation to shareholders to maximize profit. It does not simply mean "wants money". You can be for-profit without being publicly traded, but since Valve is private we'll never know.
I will always choose GOG over Steam if given the choice, but too many developers still think it’s okay to take your money without giving you true ownership of your purchase. Steam allows that exploitation and GOG does not.
In general, I'm not a fan of steam. I know i know, I'm saying this in THE steam community.
Steam is DRM, its terrible drm that can be bypassed with an easily downloaded crack tool, but drm nonetheless.
If a game I want is on GOG I will gladly get it there over buying it on steam.
Not all Steam games use it as DRM. Many Steam games you can simply launch the executable without Steam installed and it will work.
Still, GOG is much better on that front.
But even games I buy on GOG, I often launch through Steam to take advantage of tools like Proton and Steam Input. Steam’s dominance stems from unwavering commitment to building a good user experience, and I’m not ashamed to reward that with my wallet vote.
72% of devs meaning 72% of developers = people or 72% of developer studios = a bunch of suits?
Ah ok, so pointless people. They could ask an AI...
Note the survey is also posted by a company whose service is to help people publish on multiple storefronts at once.
I've been seeing a fair amount of discourse lately that Gabe Newell might be the only reason why Steam is a benevolent monopoly, and it's why I only buy games on Steam when there's no other option, when they're not otherwise available on GOG and Itch.io.
Because Steam says for now that they'll have a failsafe in place to make our games playable even if the company goes under. Steam doesn't nickel and dime people, for now. Steam is doing important work for Linux, for now. Our profiles are fun and customizable like the internet used to be, for now. Steam's DRM is so light it hardly exists, for now. But what's going to happen to our huge libraries when Gabe retires or dies?
I hate that I even have to think this way, but I for one don't want to have all my eggs in one basket, especially when the competitors' policies are doing more to protect users right now.
Yeah.
I have enjoyed many happy years with steam and for now things are still okay, with Gabe keeping the enshittification at bay. They've done great things for the industry, and have my respect for that.
Yet we can't simply trust the platform will remain as benevolent as it always has been.
If history tells us anything, it's that nothing remains the same forever.
Heroic Launcher works for GOG, Epic and Prime games.
Yes but that is a third party solution to those platforms refusing to support Linux. Good on the people developing Heroic, but Steam has native support.
Steam is naturally the only platform gamers care about because they're the only platform that acturally targers gamers, all other platforms target devs (except GOG who targets gamers that specifically want offline copies without DRM)
Monopolies are just an effect of capitalism in its current form.
I'm more concerned with the games companies who aren't even monopolies, and are already seen as shit services run by shitty people (unless anyone actually likes Ubisoft, EA, and their launchers???)
Gamers have respect for Gaben, and I've heard more faith and less worry about his son taking over than practically the entire team of owners from Valve's competitors. They have a monopoly because it's a good service, and the fact that it's has a user base as big as it does shouldn't surprise anyone: they seem to be doing things right enough to not be a bother. That's what matters more than the inevitability of a business getting big - there's a lot more Nuance and that doesn't just magically happen, nor is just pointing it out helpful in sensible critique.
People misunderstand the issue with monopolies. Monopolies, by themselvs, are non-issues. It's what they do in their position of monopoly that can be illegal, through anti-competitive behavior. Steam does none of that BS
This. So much this. Monopolies are often evidence of an unhealthy/stagnating market, but they're more symptom than cause. Trusts/cartels, price-fixing, and anticompetitive behavior are the actual abuses of market power, and are much more problematic.
I'm not going to claim that Valve is perfect (they're not, e.g. see issues regarding DRM) and I'd love to have more choices about where I buy my games, but I can't think of any instance of them abusing their position in the market to prevent new entrants or claim an unfair advantage. From what I've seen, they appear to be a very fair and honorable competitor in the space. However, if anyone is aware any examples to the contrary, I'd love to hear about it and update my opinions.
It's amazing how many people don't actually understand what a monopoly is. Every time the topic comes up you see people say things like "well there's more than one store therefore it's not a monopoly." That's never been the actual use of the word in practice. If that were true it would be so stupidly easy to circumvent monopoly laws and regulations. I mean more than it already is of course.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/monopoly
your own source says
also wikipedia
the problem with the "steam is a monopoly" argument is that they are not abusing their position, like the companies that got into hot water before (like microsoft with internet explorer, trying to push web standard their way)
Yes, when an entity creates an unreasonable restraint of competition in the market. As Steam has an overwhelming control of the market that absolutely qualifies. Also I'm going to go ahead and quote the rest since you left it out for some reason. Probably because it was devastating to your argument.
so okay the first 5 is irrelevant (right?), so it's a "near monopoly", one actor dictates the prices
but it's ea and the like floating 100$ games, valve is just taking their 30% cut of whatever people ask, and do their own thing. other platforms can do what they want on their own platform, as long as they're not selling steam keys.
i'm not buying the "market is controlled by steam" argument
i get that as a dev, if you want the best exposure on pc, your only realistic choice is to sell on steam, because it's so popular, but many people start out on itch, and when they get big enough, launch on steam. and they're still on itch too.
All right the fact that you just said you have no choice but to sell on Steam has pretty much invalidated all the other parts of your argument. That alone is enough.
Also you might want to check a little bit about steams practices when it comes to pricing. They have a lot more influence on pricing than you seem to imagine.
i didn't say steam was the only choice, in fact, i just described another way that many devs choose
regarding the price: is it steam that keeps raising them?
Steam has a monopoly: yes. Steam, like apple, takes a cut from all payments in the store, and micro transactions. Considering how Steam is a company, and could just be evil, and bad, like Google, it's:
-Contributions and implementation of the opensource software Proton-Ge, which lets me just download a windows game and play it, off steam, and is also available, free & opensource on other platforms like Lutris. -Regular deals which make it the best place to buy games, if you choose to do so. -Steamdeck
Make it a (mostly) positive force, imho. However, a billion dollar company being able to do discounts below any small game distribution companies, is bad.
Plus, who knows what the next CEO after Gabe retires will have in mind?
FYI: Proton-GE is a fork of Proton. The Glorieus Eggroll (GE) version is not affiliated with Steam/Valve
In this one case, I'm okay with its monopoly as long as Gabe is in charge. I have bought tens of thousands of dollars in games on the platform and it's crazy I can still hit download on games over 20 years old in my library AND have my save game data imported from that time.
So far, Valve has been fair to their users. Hell, they heard concerns over gambling and just took a sledgehammer to the CS2 skin market. I don't think any other company would devalue their digital assets to a tune of -3 BILLION dollars. Valve is the GOAT.
10s of thousands? HELP
I'd say it's more of a 'de facto' monopoly, as every other storefront sucks so bad.
It's ironic that Valve doesn't have shareholders forcing horrible decisions that make people hate a platform to maximize short term profits, yet they reap in crazy amounts of money per year in comparison to public companies with dogshit monetization. Funny how that goes huh?
Libraries should host a digital store front for the people's games.
Boo fucking hoo. Market can try and compete instead of using shady ways to agitate players to join their subpar service.
Nobody hates on Steam being a monopoly. Devs should thank Valve that their policy decreases piracy drastically.
If all monopolies would be like Steam, we would have no arguments against monopolies.
That's the problem imho. Right now they are "benevolent monopoly" for most of it's users, except:
We know since at least 70's, that when a company hits 4% market share, it stops innovating and competing with other companies, because buying the competition out and increasing the market share is safer and higher return (every 5% increase was 10% increase in profit, because they have to compete less).
But do they not?
Proton is a clear innovation they've implemented into their store front.
They have new lab experiments every so often, currently there's a release calendar.
Family sharing.
Game recording.
For some of those you could argue it's an already existing concept, but even so. The implementation is certainly novel. And they are certainly continuing to improve a store front unmatched in features by any other.
There was vr/gaming handhelds, but the Index and Steam deck made huge waves in the tech world..
Embracing Linux, opening up most of their UI to the people, allowing projects like Decky Loader, which has among other crowd sourced addon projects: CSS Loader which then has its own collection of crowd sourced addons, including two or three that could likely solve their font problem.
Those trading cards tied to achievements (ok, I have no idea what it's for.. but I like that it's there, lol)
I can't see how OP so strongly formed their opinion.
edit: grammer: comma conservation
I stand corrected
Usually steam is mostly praised for being a decent company. But what are the devs saying about the 30% cut. Do they think it's reasonable or is there any discontent among the devs?
That was the main argument for the Epic Games store. They told devs that they can keep the first million dollars earned and then they will only take 12%. The problem was they kept paying devs to be “Epic Exclusive” causing a lot of resentment.
Also the fact that Valve will drop games from their store should the dev/publisher sell it somewhere else cheaper.
Is that really true? Saw others in this thread debunking that.
Guess not. I thought it applied to non-key games as well, but apparently not.
They "debunked" it by citing Steam terms of service regarding Steam Keys, which is about as relevant as citing Harry Potter.
That's only for steam keys.
What does that have to do with my comment?
So you're saying even in the case of steam keys valve is cool with it?
This study is just asking managers, they didn't talk to devs. Also how is it a monopoly when 80% expect to be using non steam distribution channels in 5 years? Maybe I'm missing something because the source study isn't available without giving them your name and email but their stats look contradictory to me and their method is... Well corporate managers aren't really devs IMO.
https://rokky.com/pc-game-distribution-report-2025
I find it fascinating that Lemmings suddenly turn off their critical thinking skills when it comes to Valve. We really need to study this.
But they're my favorite treat seller 🙁
What criticism of Valve do you have?
Aside from fostering and enabling a gambling addiction in millions of children?
Well they are being criticized for this in every relevant thread so I wonder if there's something else for your critical thinking claim.
If only this was true.
Is it not?
100% this
I love Steam, but I don't like how their rules seems to biased against Japanese games.
There are plenty of JP games outright refused by Steam despite have zero have adult content, and perfectly fine on being released on GOG, (edit: and also Nintendo!) or other digital platform.
Especially with visual novels and games with psychology theme.
Idle speculation: maybe it has to do w/ the nightmare of their copy write/distribution laws. For instance Sony (yuck) has contracted Japanese VAs for dialogue in certain games(helldivers 2) but won't allow anyone outside Japan to even purchase the option.
Those are entirely different thing.
It's just classic case of Sony doesn't want to pay additional license of Japanese voice for non-JP release.
Whenever Japanese VA is available, the option are presents on every single game release on Steam except of Western big budget AA or AAA-developed games.
I'm curious what the Japanese devs think might be the problem with Steam in this case. I know dlsite has been the main place for trying to sell their own indie stuff
I remember several conversation on Twitter from Japanese dev. They already consider Steam as monopoly, especially as Japanese PC game scene itself has already several competing store, from DMM, DLsite, Getchu, Melonbooks, Booth.pm, and so on.
That's a nightmare minefield you're insisting on as the meaning of art can be skewed. Does the Triumph of Will count as a film or a propaganda film? Does the Wolf Warrior series count as propaganda? Steam probably doesn't want to be dragged into another legal issues like in Australia so that's the choice they've made.
And it's not like you cannot get it anywhere else. There are plenty of other places like GOG as you said or Dlsite or others I wouldn't mention.
Oftentimes, niche genre only can survive on platform with huge reach.
Releasing it only on DLsite or GOG means either they have to drive up the price to even cover the development cost. This often happen on niche Nintendo games or big budget R18+ on DLsite.
Some big budget games on DLsite can reach around 70USD, while when it gets released on Steam it's only 20-40USD.
They don't have a monopoly. They just have the best platform. It offers a lot of quality of life features along with the games and rarely causes issues. I can't even recall them ever doing anything anticompetitive. There are other platforms available to purchase from if you don't like steam. GoG for instance. Or Epic if you want to support assholes.
The number of people in this thread claiming that Steam is not a monopoly is too damn high. If actually you’re interested in the evidence, the Organized Money podcast recently had a great interview with pair of lawyers whose full time job is suing Valve as a monopolist on antitrust grounds, and winning over and over on behalf of their clients.
Where is that evidence? (That is not a podcast with one of the involved parties in it)
I quickly looked into it and there is zero public indication that Bucher Law PLLC ever won a single lawsuit against Valve. One lawsuit of Valve against Bucher Law PLLC (in response to their arbitrations) was dismissed.
https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/10620119/valve-corporation-v-bucher-law-pllc-et-ano/
The only thing they do is file arbitrations, which they are apparently "winning" but they did not provide any further proof of that.
All the "grand victories" are celebrated exclusively on their own website. Mostly you find people on Reddit claiming that they are a scam and a really weird Youtube commercial.
They also claim multiple times that Federal Judge John C. Coughenour ruled that Valve is an "illegal monopoloy". Which I cannot find any records for. Unrelated to Bucher Law, Coughenour was the judge in Wolfire vs Valve and he threw Wolfire's case against Valve out in 2021 but allowed them to proceed in 2022. Coughenour then resigned from the case.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/59859024/wolfire-games-llc-v-valve-corporation/
The case is now a class action lawsuit against Valve and still ongoing.
You’ve only highlighted what’s so fucked up about binding arbitration: it’s secretive. It forces plaintiffs to retain individual counsel, with arbitration clauses in contracts typically blocking class actions in public court and requiring you to waive your right to a trial by a jury of your peers. This means there is no precedent that is set or that binds future decisions by the arbitrator, there is no public record that gets reported on and embarrasses companies, and there are no large payouts to be recovered when a million people get nickel-and-dimed for a few bucks each and can sue as a class.
I only worked with what you provided, alleged evidence of Valve being a monopoly. The US legal system being... questionable has nothing to do with it.
Bucher Law could provide proof of their arbitation successes on their own at any time at least but they didn't even do that. And even if, that does not proof that Valve is a monopoly because there is no judge and no ruling.
Until the Wolfire case (that is an actual case) gets a verdict by an actual judge, these are just a few law firms trying to make a quick buck.
That’s just begging the question, isn’t it, requiring a conviction as a monopolist as the only acceptable form of evidence of monopolization? If someone said the same thing about Google when Epic sued them in 2020, would you have waited the 3 years it took to get a trial verdict before making up your mind?
Also, many arbitration settlements include NDAs as a condition of getting a payout, so it’s disingenuous to say they could provide evidence that might require their clients to forfeit their settlements or risk them getting disbarred.
I agree the venue is unfortunate, but why are you insisting on giving the giant for-profit corporation the benefit of the doubt rather than the consumers who are trying to hold them accountable?
Legally speaking, yes.
Ethically speaking, I have not seen sufficient evidence to call Valve a monopoly yet. Obviously everyone can call Valve a monopoly, or not, I don't really care either way. Actual evidence would have to come in the form of documents proofing Valve manipulates prices, hinders competition or anything similar.
Unfortunately most documents in the Wolfire vs Valve case are not publicly available. The point Wolfire makes in their statement about not being able to sell their keys cheaper than on Steam, has some merit but I will leave it to the judge to decide on that one. It's not enough for me personally to call that anti-competitive.
I did make up my mind, but there was no evidence until the ruling.
Fair point, many do. They could mention it though.
Because I am the consumer in this case and I don't see any wrongdoing by Valve in this case. There are other store fronts on PC, Valve doesn't force any prices, they don't force exclusivity, they don't buy competition up and they don't prevent the competing stores from functioning in any way.
People simply flock to Steam because it's the best service and until Valve engages in (proven) anti-competitive behaviour, there is no reason to change anything about that.
Is the 30% cut they demand too much? Yes. Are they engaging in unethical gambling? Yes. Are they a monopoly? Not in my opinion.
That's incredible that's even a thing. Saving this for a listen, thanks.
You don't say.
Yo guys it's my cake day! happy birthday me!!!
To me, the amount of excusing from the gamer community is incredible. Stuff like “they’re not a monopoly because they’re ethical and I like Steam.”
They are, in fact, a growing pseudo monopoly. They take anticompetitive measures, with their APIs and storefront policies (like dictating pricing on other stores). Set aside the 30% cut, and no, it’s mostly not enshittified on the consumer side…
Yet.
How can people type that out on Reddit + Windows 11, or on their phones, with spam and ads in their face, without seeing the future danger? The irony is tremendous.
Don’t mistake me, I like Valve and the storefront they’ve run so far. I happily use it. But I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them, and am waiting for the shoe to drop.
I don't know what you're expecting. Publishers don't put every game on GoG and all the publisher run stores are very anti consumer, or they're EGS which will definitely turn anti consumer the second they think they've got the market share. Where are you wanting people to buy their games?
I want them available and Itch and GoG or publisher stores or elsewhere, basically anything but one store unless they need Steam for API features.
I want Steam to not have so much marketshare they can dictate prices to other stores.
The status quo right now is okay, but I don’t like the direction it’s heading, where other stores may not even keep their heads above water.
This seems to be suggesting that a large portion of games is only published to steam, which I don't think is the case?
Except it literally is, per the article?
Well, this is publishers complaining. Maybe they should publish on other platforms. I don't know what they expect to happen lol
As far as I am aware, they only dictate the pricing of Steam keys on other stores. That seems fair to me, because they are doing the distribution in that case. Games that are on Steam can be cheaper elsewhere if they're distributed separately.
That being said, I totally agree that they're a monopoly based on their market power.
What I’ve read is that devs can’t price games lower than Steam on a non-Steam storefront that doesn’t use Steam keys.
For instance, if a dev has their own little DRM free store page where they sell DRM free downloads, they can’t take the 30% fee off their own store (reflecting what they’d actually make) without risking being delisted.
Maybe it’s an OCD thing, but this bothers me as a consumer. I could pay the same price for, say, Rimworld from Ludeon or from Steam, but Ludeon would get significantly less from the Steam sale.
It’s also anti competitive. For example, it means some other storefront with a lower fee can’t use that as a pricing advantage.
…It’s not a massive issue now. In practice, most little devs just sell Steam keys, and most publishers want to maintain pricing parity (outside of sales) for consistency.
Who said anything resembling “they’re not a monopoly because they’re ethical and I like Steam.”?
Like half the comments on this thread are absolutely in that vein.
No they aren't.
Wow stunning argument. I was going to sit here and trust my eyes. But the depths of rhetorical Flair you have just expressed have rendered me powerless to argue.
Yeah, it's about as stunning as yours.
The comment threads above mine?
I typed this out before I saw them, not expecting much of that on Lemmy (being a enshittification refuge and all).
No they don't
Not a single one of those are saying anything close to what you claimed...
Friend, I don't know what more you could want. That's... pretty similar.
They didn't say they don't have a monopoly because they are ethical. They said they don't have a monopoly and also that they are ethical.
The fact that you have to cherry pick and misrepresent context to try and save face is pretty pathetic TBH.
The difference is that Steam is not a public company. While they have done some problematic things, everything they have done has been to benefit the customers.
Plenty of stores dictate the price on other stores. The idea is just to keep pricing consistent across the board. Why would one store list a product and help advertise it when they know they aren't going to sell much of because it's cheaper elsewhere.
Physical items have some leeway in that as stores can mark things down, but digital items are the same regardless of where you get it from, and when it comes to steam if a store is selling a steam key Valve does not take the 30%, meaning they get nothing out of a key sold elsewhere and will sell less copies themselves if the other keys are cheaper.
On that 30%, I remember articles coming out when steam was gaining traction that showed how little it was compared to physical stores. When you combined creating the physical game, shipping, and store cut developers were lucky to get 50% of the game cost. And that didn't count GameStop pushing preowned for $2 less that the dev didn't get any cut of.
They have reversed a lot of things that the customers pushed back on as well.
As long as GabeN is in charge I don't think they will go public and become shit. Apparently his son is poised to take over when he retires or passes and is in the same mindset of this father, but time will tell.
Valve got to where it is specifically by playing the long game and looking forward while putting the customer first. The efforts they made for VR and the Steam Deck would not have happened in any other company.
They aren't buying small studios to crush them like all the rest are.
…How is this okay?!
Let’s put it another way. What if Walmart upcharged for some product, and told the manufacturer “if you don’t raise prices at every other store, we might pull your brand.”
They have no choice if Walmart is the majority of their marketshare.
What if Amazon did this? Or EGS, if they had 75% market share?
…Yes, it’s a massive improvement over physical retail. Does that mean 30% across the board is okay? And what about the factor of most devs getting crowded out by a much larger selection, now?
…And plenty of private companies are anti consumer. Some get worse going private. That’s no guarantee.
Look, Steam is incredible in many ways. One massively understated thing is Valve's attempts to keep the store tagged an organized, which is a enormous boon to “niche” games and gamers, as opposed to spammy, unsorted messes like the iOS/Android App Stores or Amazon. It’s clear they actually care about their consumers and sellers, and their long term experience, and the actual quality of their store.
…But I still do not trust one company with an entire sector. I want GoG, or Itch, or hell, even EGS to still have some market share in whatever niches work for them, in case Steam starts to enshittify.
Reward corporations for good behavior. Don't trust them.
Amazon does do that, and people hate it for it. Lemmings just seem to suddenly go blind when dealing with Valve's shitty practices.
Being the most attractive platform doesn't make them a monopoly. It does however irritate me anytime I have to use a different platform that often functions much worse, like EA or Blizzard.
Then maybe provide a better alternative? Competition is good for the market but in this case the competition is absolute dogshit. It's not Steam's fault.
Sure, but it's well earned. The rest doesn't do shit. When Microsoft dominated, they made things worse.
I'm just waiting for the day Steam makes Proton proprietary after outcompeting all the indie open source Linux gaming solutions. And watch as gamers promptly not give a shit and be as uncritically worshipping of this giant profit oriented corporation as they are now. The speed at which people abandoned and outright started hating on other Linux gaming compatibility layers developed by individual people for "sucking" is insane. This is so on the nose Embrace Extend Extinguish but god forbid you call that out and spoil the vibe for people.
"Every other corporation of this size has proven to be my worst enemy but Steam is definitely my friend and has zero ulterior motives. In fact fuck you for daring to speak ill of them."
Wouldn't it just get forked?
Sure, once it happens they can add more features, but there's already proton forks today that are recommended for some games, such as https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom
Sure, the company is for profit, but I don't really see a mechanism where a rugpull is possible here.
You think the company facilitating DRM and micro transactions won't ban your account the instant it detects you're not using their approved proprietary version of Proton? You don't think they'll implement breaking changes to make the open source version useless?
have we seen examples of such behaviour from valve yet? i don't think they're without fault, but worrying about shutting down their open source developments has no basis imo
I don't trust any corporation to keep their open source projects completely open forever. As soon as profits dip they'll start looking at open source as a missed opportunity to squeeze more money out of users. Look at, oh I don't know, Reddit, Android, VSCode, Redis, MongoDB, Sentry, Draw.io, Elastic, Hashi, CentOS, and especially OpenAI. Remember, they own the IPs, they can switch licenses at will and take all the community contributions with it. And it's not always as overt as making the whole thing proprietary all at once. They'll slowly start introducing proprietary components until the open source part is basically useless without them.
maybe if they go public, the shareholders would pressure them, but until then, they are doing well enough, by any standard, to just keep going as they were
I'm not sure that's how that shakes out, you can't exactly extinguish open source projects, they may go dormant but they are still there, and there would be the last open source proton build to start from too.
It would also annoy the very people who are most likely to make their own compatibility tools and inconvenience themselves to spite bad business practice. Maybe in some future world where everyone is on Linux/proton, the people who just blindly use windows today because they always have would just keep using the now proprietary proton, but that's far from the way it is today.
Honestly I just use what is easiest to get working, used to do every game manually, then used Lutris, now I use Steam, probably will use something else that's easier in the future, especially if/when my library disappears. Til then I'll support the company that made it much easier to leave Microsoft behind. Nice bonus: valve is one of the least bad large companies in the US at time of writing, so it feels less awful to give them money.
But steam would never do that!
🥺 <-- see? It's just a lil guy!
antitrust for thee but not for me
Do you know what monopoly means?
This kind of whining and pearl clutching HAS to be funded by the shitty pretender platforms who can't fucking hack it with their alternative business models. The market will tell, as these types love to fall back on as an argument, and the reason Steam does so well is because it's consistent, accessible, and minimally invasive in the face of any complaints I've ever seen levied against it. When Epic stops shitting its pants, and Luna offers something original and competitive, we'll see a change in this 'monopoly' status, but crying about it isn't going to change the fact that Steam remains a quality product running at high efficiency. It's Gabe's game to lose, if he decides to exclude more producers and increase fees and profits for the company, that'll hurt it, but this stinky rag article isn't doing shit but telling on itself.
72% of devs have no clue what the word monopoly means. That would mean that Steam is the only store selling PC games on the market, but that's not the case. Hell, the article itself mentions several:
So, a monopoly? Most definitely not. A market leader or holder of a vast majority? Yes.
That's not what that word means. Zero competition is virtually impossible unless government is strongly enforcing it
Do you also think Google isn’t a search monopoly because Bing exists? This is a very bad argument that completely ignores market power.
Well, yes? According to Merriam-Webster:
I'm not arguing that Steam doesn't have overwhelming market power, it most certainly does. But key words here are "exclusive" and "one party" and Steam does not control the PC market exclusively, nor are they the only party on the market.
The question isn’t so much whether a company is a monopoly, or part of a duopoly, or oligopoly, but whether their market power lets them coerce their rivals, suppliers, customers, etc. It’s a common misconception that a company needs 100% of a market before they can exert monopoly power (as a seller), and the threshold is even lower for monopsony power (as a buyer), which is common in labor markets with powerful employers, for example.
Legal thresholds for application of anti-monopoly laws have historically been quite low as well. For example, in Brown Shoe Co. v. United States in 1962, the US Supreme Court approved blocking a merger between Brown, a company that manufactured less than 6% of shoes in the US, and Kinney, a company that sold only 2% of shoes! And that actually seems like the right approach, since the Clayton Act, for example, doesn’t only prohibit acquiring 100% of a market (which would render it worthless), but blocks any acquisition when “the effect of such acquisition may be substantially to lessen competition.”
Well yeah.
They spent the better part of two decades paying big publishers and sucking their cock and balls.
And G*mers have been cheering on the whoring out of PC gaming.